My cycling blog

Monday, March 18, 2013

"Just how far will you go to have your breakfast on a Sunday Morning? Literally?Announcing the Sunday Morning Breakfast Ride (SMBR -- pronounced Sambar).Pick a spot, not IISc, not where you usually have your Sunday breakfast.Ride a cycle, preferably in a group. Be back before Lunch (2PM).Tell us in a ride report (short or long):1) How many km?2) Where?3) How the food was.This challenge runs every Sunday.Please note, the distance is not really very important ;)"

My attempt at making an SMBR logo :)

This is a report of my first SMBR ride.
I wanted a short ride so I proposed a ride on the mailing list with the destination being the Davanagere Benne Dose place at Nelamangala. This SMBR ride route had already been ridden a few times before, so this time to add to the fun factor we attempted to explore a marginally different route, which was picked randomly with the general principle of avoiding the highway and preferring the backstreets.
The standard route to the Benne Dose place is also beautiful, but it was well-trodden and this was the reason to explore new backstreets. We ended up getting lost multiple times (which was fun, actually), passing through nice backstreets alongside villages. Here is the approximate route we took to the breakfast place:

Our rider group size was microscopic at two riders, Hari D. and myself. We left at about 7am and soon Hari D. had a flat within a couple kilometres on the Nelamangala highway, even before we entered Hesarghatta Road leading to backstreets.

After fixing the flat, we continued riding on the backstreets, losing our way every now and then :-)

The phone GPS took so long to lock when we needed it, that I adopted a simpler way to navigate - looking at the shadow, it was morning, and we needed to go west in general, and so we rode choosing roads such that the shadow was in front of us for most of the time. :-) Thus we traveled westward on average.

We stopped briefly for a pre-breakfast of vada and tea :-) ...

... and continued getting lost on the back roads, enjoying ourselves. (All the while traveling westward, on average).

Monday, May 28, 2012

I made up a route on a map, planning to ride it to see if it was suitable to make into a populaire route.
Karthikeyan joined me and it turned out to be a quite a nice 175km ride.
The route : from_campus-Doddaballapur-Gauribudanur-Chikabellapur-Nandi-Dodaballapur-and_back

We started at six am on an empty stomach.
There is a Nandini milk parlour before yelahanka. I had some flavoured milk here.

And by 7am, some nice breakfast (poori + 2x idli + vada + tea) at this place, on Doddaballapur road, a few km before Doddaballapur.

There was of course, some traffic on Doddaballapur road, as expected. But after that, which was the key part of the ride, the loop back to Doddaballapur, had great roads and very sparse traffic! This was a very pleasant surprise making the whole ride worth every pedal stroke.
The below images have captions, you may read them. The images are also clickable, to be viewed in a bigger size.

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur. (Photo credit : Karthikeyan)

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur.

Tourism sign board on the road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur. We were trying to make a note of the places on the right side of this board for planning our next rides :) :)

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur.

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur. You can see Gunjur lake on the right (it's a small one)

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur.

Road from Doddaballapur to Gauribidanur.

There are loads of fresh fruit and vegetable at the large marketplace at Gauribidanur. We had a glass of sugarcane juice there and stocked up on a few bananas.

Road from Gauribidanur to Chikkaballapur

Road from Gauribidanur to Chikkaballapur.

Road from Gauribidanur to Chikkaballapur.

Road from Gauribidanur to Chikkaballapur.

Road from Gauribidanur to Chikkaballapur.

Cows along the road from Gauribidanur to Chikkaballapur.

This is the pass just before Chikaballapur, that we had to cross. This was kind of a steep climb, but short, under about 2km.

After
the pass, there is this dam. The Penneru river (on the left) was dry!
It is seasonal, and is supposed to be a torrent in season. But now, the dam itself looked like a small pond - not much water here this time
of the year, in summer.

.

Karthikeyan at the dam.

We had our lunch at Chikkabellapur at 1:15pm and then headed towards Nandi via the road beside Skandagiri hills.

The Nandi peak (I've not confirmed that this is Nandi peak, this is what Karthikeyan said and he's generally good with routes and geographical sense :)) is visible from the pass beside Nandi.

The pass between Nandi and another hill.

The pass between Nandi and another hill.

Top of the pass between Nandi and another hill. A lot of descent follows :)

The road from Nandi to Doddaballapur too is good and has low trafffic.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

NOTE: THIS IS A DRAFT COPY. Mainly pictures only as of now. Route map from gpx file, coming up.

I was forced to boot the front tyre this time!! Aaargh . It started wobbling at first (because a bulge came up in the tire somehow). So after the eery past experience during the 200k brevet, Pooviah and me immediately stopped to boot it before it had a chance to burst. This was on the way, in the morning, on Tumkur road. I also happened to forget (and lose) my sunglasses here :( )

We used this sheet of tarpaulin this time :)

On the way:

Panorama: A car zipped by in the middle of it :)

Pooviah

You can see the switchbacks here from the peak.

On the way back:

On the way back, the descents got us braking a lot. At the end I suggested that we stop and check our rims (for fun), and oh! they were too warm, bordering on hot actually :)